


blank pages

by quinault



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, tomione - Freeform, verse fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:06:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29803356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quinault/pseuds/quinault
Summary: A tomione verse ficlet inspired by Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	1. Bundle

They could tell him apart from the other cribs right away by the look in his eyes

Like two dark pits they punch into the world

Watchful as cold diamonds in the hollow dark

His cold heat slowly pours out

One little lung, then two pucker, and wheeze down

_The mother did not make it, no_

He might not have known the difference if it hadn’t been for their looks

He feels mismatched somehow like his insides might be coal black

 _Rotten rotten rotten_ the matrons whisper the children whisper everybody whispers

Goodness is a golden gleam he learns to imitate

He peoples his childhood as best as he knows how

Stolen artifacts: other people’s beloveds

They wilt under his possession like exotic plants that cannot take root

Anemic figures stare out at him from closet doors like hostages

Strange things make him blossom

Elfling child that he is the others learn to tiptoe around him

With bruises and broken arms he twists them into order

Small wiry frame that already knows how to dominate space

Strange accidents and children’s bodies are rushed limp and bloodless into the infirmary

Savage accusations do not quite decide upon him, but swirl

Magic settles into the crevices of his skin like a liquid

Secretly he is afraid of the immensity inside him

Children wander blind inside sea caves like Aztec sacrifices

Sacrifice melts into satisfaction

He feels reborn every time


	2. Names

There is a scar in place of his smile how did it get there he wonders?

He likes names, plays with them

Perhaps because he is small for his age, big names make him feel untouchable, like a god that resides upon a pagan’s island

Little round heads like matchsticks all in a row cook’s hawkish eyes behind the ladle raised (thank you) calls TOM

Four of them perk up

His dreams are a hot mass of serpents

They call his name in their strange serpent tongue and every night he wakes sweating

What is he that can understand them, boy or something else? He quivers

In the pulsing animal darkness he feels branded


	3. Mother

When he imagines her egg white face she is always stitching (the yellowed photograph unfailingly in his breast pocket)

As though nervous to pin the frayed fabric of her future her long fingers twitch

He does not think he could tell their hands apart, hers and his own upon first glance

This makes him want to lift smooth alabaster skin clean off and watch blood dance

Can pain be transmitted across genetics? Down five metres into the grave?

The rattling cough of a little boy still inside him

_Have you seen my mother? She was meant to pick me up_


	4. Looking

The transfiguration professor looks at him and then looks no more

As though he can see past translucent skin into a heart cold and dead before its time

(Love me love me love me love me love me love me love me love me love me—)

Everything about him feels untimely, from his coal black eyes to his prima ballerina walk

An adult grown and shrunk again

(No)

He does not know what he has done to deserve this trust gone like the wind obliterates the leaves

He finds his way to the dormitories with his head downcast, feeling every inch the orphan in this wonderland of riches, this so-called school

Countless magicked portraits watch him go they recognize this solitude

He stares out of his professionalism it shocks H back into herself

So young to be so smooth

“Like a gemstone”

No—something slipper, viler, unseen at the bottom of a lake but felt, with the edge of the foot

“You like me”

“To excise you from the world would give me relief”

“I would like to be excised. And lifted up high”

“Displayed for the operating theatre”

Speaking to him makes her think of tumours. How ruby red and glistening like his lips. He blooms just the same way. Like the body, but more


	5. Body

He keeps a note of his body—watches with the collector’s eye the bits that come and go with the years

Upon further inspection he never actually receives an upbringing, although he learns to imitate one well

Privately he savours being monster and gentleman wrapped into one—how none of them ever knows a thing about him

“I knew you”

“Only because I let you”

“I think I wanted to save you”

“You wanted to save yourself a good seat”

A bodiless future

By age ten only the whirlwind of teeth remains

He dreams of scraps of flesh, bone of the father

In the mirror: every hair is in place, his beauty does not stutter

But it does not hear him either

Slogging through the overgrowth of school he imagines himself someplace else, someone else

His body slips off him like skin off grapes

Big red vacuum of his soul is a poor imitation of most’s

The house has been blown clean off, foundation with it

Who could say whether it had been there in the first place?

He fills it with rage like candy bars and daytime tv

Starts collecting orphans of his own, bloated in their own loathing, in love with it

(Privately he believes the rage only adds to his beauty, to his becoming)

They stand in dusk-stained thickets and let loathing twist their bodies like amorous limbs

Hatred makes T tender every time like limb-loosening love

Small animal of his body rears on its hind legs

Desire shooting up—

Even his orphans gorgeous in it this infectiousness he prides in

“It is a disgusting love”

“Why did I have no other”

Thin fire dances in what is left of his soul

Long fingers knew only how to stitch she might have been trying to help her only son

“She only knew enough magic to get herself the family way”

(H would often feel her own fingers drift off to her cigarette case. Addictions were better this way, out of sight)

Distinctions not so razor-sharp at all levels in the body

For instance her cells know they are dying though her brain denies it

Smoke settles, dries, like lava at the planetary surface

‘Smoke inhalation’ was the father’s cause of death on the report (same name as him?) rest of the family perished in the fire too

“Spontaneous combustion” he jokes

V gestates slowly as the years fit into jaws like nesting dolls, orphans multiplying around him

Who would miss T were he to disappear?

At nights his consciousness dipping dipping dipping like a boat at sea gone beyond the next big wave this is the closest he’ll ever come to nothing he thinks

“I would miss you”

“Liar” he snarls

His soul perpetually shreds itself bloody bits trail by like streamers

The act of knowing and unknowing: atomic box that clicks open and shut in a second’s thousandth

Like everyone else, he poisons himself atom by atom, such that he barely notices

Likes talking about ‘some part of himself:’ engenders that quality of being scattered and untouchable

That quality of being brighter than bombs

It is with awe and disgust that she tracks the nuclear fallout of his soul


	6. Hunger

All cold he is like fine cut ice

Cruel as a gash of lipstick on bloodless face

His education is no-nonsense: stiff rod and fifteen good ones curves his spine out

An education as bold as blood on white shirts

Violence wallpapers the bare rooms of his loneliness

Makes an artist of him

He learns to sharpen his rage like so many knives

A loathing as tender as love drives him: in a police line-up he would make the same mistake every time

He is stirred by madness though he will never admit this

She is hungry for him though she will never admit this

Fear blossoms inside her—hundreds of buds like the breath of spring

Their mutual hungers coil like snakes around one another

The event horizon of her own desire leaves her breathless

He coaches her through the addiction

(She forces him into her lungs)

They say the best liars love stories— he spins them with ready golden tongue

They fall off his lips like ripe fruit— he no longer bothers to gather what falls

He is obsessed with all the things that do not belong to him—with degrees of difference

He and all the great men of history shuffling around a dinner table

“Fame is luck” he insists as he pores over tea leaves and prophecies, convinces himself his is areversible fate

Dreams cannot keep his doom away

The tragedy of him rings like a bell though he cannot feel a thing

(We were there to watch it approach)

Common sinners all have endings like this

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few things that have been changed for this ficlet: 
> 
> 1\. Method of the Riddles' death   
> 2\. No time travel—Hermione is born during Tom's timeline 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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